The Destroy All Humans games are why I bought a PS2. I fell in love with it when I saw demo video. If you've seen any Grand Theft Auto, it's kind of like that. You have HUGE sandbox environments that you can run/fly around. You can pick when you do missions and when you just want to fly around destroying things and picking fights with the locals.
Destroy All Humans 2 manages surpass its predecessor, Destroy All Humans, in just about every single aspect of game play. Want more landing zones and the ability to call your ship so you don't waste time backtracking? Done. Want to add a second player? Done. Need the alert level up/down? Just body snatch a police officer and find a police phone. Annoyed trying to find those hidden items? Finish tasks to get a limited radar that helps you spot them when you're close. Need some help to keep the bad guys off your back? Enter Gastro!
Gastro was my favorite addition. He's an armored janitor who sounds kind of like Eddie Murphy and when fully upgraded, he can dish out some serious damage. I used him to buy some breathing room when fighting the end boss and he not only survived he took the guy down maybe a third of his life bar. You can only have one Gastro out at a time though and your ammo capacity for him is only one unit, so you can't go completely nuts using him.
I am conflicted when reviewing this game. As much as it improved on so many things, the game just loses something. Compared to the brilliant story of the first game, this one is mediocre at best. KGB drugging a city to make them become commies and rebel, boring. A single missile getting to your mother ship and destroying it with ease, pathetic. Replacing a homicidal alien ranting about destroying the pathetic monkeys on the planet with basically a horny teenager constantly spouting bad pickup lines and taking orders from a rouge Russian chick in the hopes he can maybe get laid, lame.
The greatest disappointment was the loss of the Majestics. If you haven't played the first game, they're basically the Men In Black. There was real danger in raising the city's awareness of your activities by causing too much havoc, but now you just have to worry about the army showing up. Majestics could see through your disguise, were crack shots, and sometimes had heavy weapons. Now you get attacked by tanks, but with your new transmutation ability you can literally grab them with your psychokinesis and squish them into a little ball of foil and that little ball even becomes ammo. You can theoretically stay in a fire fight vs the army forever.
Speaking of fighting, the changes to your space ship are especially helpful. A handy feature that was added is a cloaking device. It doesn't last very long, but it can be very helpful for tasks that require you to pick something up and drop it off without damaging it. The biggest advantage however is that once unlocked, you can now transmute destroyed vehicles into ammunition. This means you can use your big guns much more often. It's really cool, but kind of makes things a little too easy; the ability to drain health from intact vehicles is also handy but again removes some challenge. All things considered, the game is simply much easier than the first one for both ground and saucer combat, but a word of advice, the more lives you lose the harder the final mission is to complete.
Even with the weaker story and a little lack of challenge, this game won't disappoint. I got maybe 25 hours of play out of it, though the last 5 hours were cleaning up the final odd jobs and locating all the alien cells and artifacts. Especially for the low price, getting this game is really a no brainer. Buy the game. You'll love it!
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